Senior SDET - Test Automation & Performance Engineering | Contract | Remote US

The Role:

We are looking for a Senior SDET / Test Automation Engineer for a project based assignment to build the automated testing and release systems that ensure our products remain reliable as traffic, data volume, integrations, partners, and release velocity increase. This is a hands-on engineering role focused on test automation, API and integration testing, performance and scalability testing, and CI/CD quality gates within an AWS-based environment.
This is not a manual QA position. You will design and build reusable test infrastructure, automate critical product and partner workflows, create realistic performance scenarios, and provide engineering teams with clear evidence of whether a release is ready for production.
You will work closely with engineering teams and the Performance & Reliability Engineering Lead to ensure quality and scalability are built into the development lifecycle rather than treated as a final release checkpoint.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design and evolve the automated testing architecture across products and engineering teams
• Build and maintain automated API, integration, contract, end-to-end, regression, and UI tests where appropriate
• Develop reusable test frameworks, fixtures, synthetic data, mocks, and environment strategies
• Build automated testing for distributed services and integrations running within AWS environments
• Design and execute load, stress, spike, soak, scalability, degradation, and recovery tests
• Translate performance and capacity scenarios into repeatable automated test suites with measurable pass/fail thresholds
• Model realistic workloads, concurrency levels, traffic patterns, data volumes, and dependency behavior
• Integrate automated suites into CI/CD pipelines and establish enforceable quality and release gates
• Create automated release checks tied to quality, latency, reliability, and performance thresholds
• Establish practices for identifying, quarantining, diagnosing, and eliminating flaky tests
• Improve test observability and failure reporting so engineers can quickly understand and diagnose issues
• Build and maintain reliable test data and test environment strategies
• Debug failures across APIs, services, databases, infrastructure, and external integrations
• Partner with Performance & Reliability Engineering to validate scalability assumptions and production readiness
• Partner with Security Engineering on permissions, isolation, negative-path, and abuse-related test scenarios
• Track testing trends and help reduce escaped defects, flaky tests, manual release effort, and regression risk
• Coach engineers on testability, automation, quality ownership, and defect-prevention practices

Required Skills:

• Strong experience as an SDET, Software Engineer in Test, Test Automation Engineer, Quality Engineer, or similar engineering-focused testing role
• Strong software development and test automation skills
• Experience testing APIs, distributed services, integrations, and cloud-based applications
• Hands-on experience working within AWS environments
• Strong experience building automated API and integration test frameworks
• Hands-on performance and scalability testing experience using tools such as k6, Gatling, Locust, JMeter, or equivalent
• Experience designing realistic performance workloads rather than simply executing predefined load tests
• Experience with load, stress, spike, soak, and scalability testing
• Strong experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines
• Experience establishing automated quality gates and release criteria
• Experience with contract testing and testing across service boundaries
• Strong understanding of test-data management, synthetic data, fixtures, mocks, and environment reliability
• Experience using logs, metrics, traces, and other observability tools to diagnose test and system failures
• Strong debugging skills across applications, APIs, infrastructure, databases, and integrations
• Experience identifying and reducing flaky or unreliable automated tests
• Ability to influence engineering teams and promote shared ownership of quality without becoming a centralized testing bottleneck

Nice to have:

• Experience testing high-scale SaaS or distributed platforms
• Experience with AWS services supporting highly available or distributed applications
• Experience testing systems with significant traffic, concurrency, or availability requirements
• Experience with resilience, failure injection, dependency degradation, or recovery testing
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and ephemeral or automated test environments
• Experience with security-adjacent testing, including permissions, authentication, authorization, isolation, and negative-path scenarios
• Identity, DNS, registry, or security domain experience
• Experience building quality or test platforms used across multiple engineering teams

What Success Looks Like
Within your first several months, you will have:

• Established a clear risk-based automation strategy across critical product and partner workflows
• Built reliable automated regression, API, integration, and contract test coverage
• Created repeatable performance and scalability tests for the platform's highest-risk journeys
• Established realistic test-data and environment strategies
• Integrated critical test suites directly into CI/CD pipelines
• Implemented measurable release gates tied to quality, latency, reliability, and performance thresholds
• Reduced flaky tests and improved the clarity and actionability of automated test failures
• Established performance trend reporting and repeatable load, soak, and failure-testing capabilities
• Reduced manual release validation and increased confidence in production readiness
• Helped establish shared quality ownership across engineering teams

Employment type:

• Contract

*Applicants must be authorized to work for ANY employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time